The present invention relates to telecommunications systems, and more particularly to the use of telecommunications systems to report on the call traffic to particular directory numbers.
Advertisers today struggle with trying to identify which advertising is effective and, more importantly, which is not. Advertisers may spend several thousand dollars or more producing advertising campaigns in an attempt to capture the attention of an intended market. Those advertisers try to target their advertising to particular groups of consumers by tailoring the advertising campaign media, the frequency of the campaign, the nature of the advertisements, and many other techniques. Advertisers may place advertisements in newspapers, magazines, trade journals, direct mailings, yellow pages and television. Unfortunately, advertisers do not have an accurate and timely mechanism for gauging the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. An age old quote sums up the dilemma of the advertisers: xe2x80x9cHalf the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is, I don""t know which half.xe2x80x9d
Some attempts are being made to identify which advertising campaigns are effective. Examples are the use of different directory numbers (phone numbers) for each advertising campaign. In that way, advertisers may analyze their phone bills at the end of the month and count the number of calls placed to particular directory numbers. That mechanism is crude, inefficient, and untimely. Business people that are focusing on increasing sales and building products or training service people do not have the time to count phone numbers on their phone bills. An automated system that is capable of providing the advertiser with tailored and accurate reports on which advertising campaigns are effective has eluded those skilled in the art.
In addition, the advertiser may be conducting a costly advertising campaign that would be best discontinued immediately if only the advertiser could evaluate immediately whether the campaign was effective. Monthly phone bills or reporting are inadequate to service that advertiser""s needs. In addition, such reporting does not capture a crucial piece of information to the advertiser-what calls were attempted to the advertiser but were not completed because of a busy signal or no answer. That information is not available through conventional telephone billing or reporting services. However, that information is extremely valuable to the advertiser. The advertiser would very much like to identify those potential consumers for whom the advertising was effective, but whose needs were unsatisfied because of a no answer or a busy signal.
An effective mechanism for an advertiser to monitor advertising effectiveness has eluded those skilled in the art. Accordingly, a need exists for a system or method for evaluating and reporting on the effectiveness of an advertising campaign being conducted by an advertiser and which is capable of generating a report in near-real-time so that an advertiser always has current information upon which to base its advertising decisions.
The present invention overcomes the problems identified above by providing a system and method for accurately and timely identifying which of an advertiser""s advertising campaigns are effective. Briefly described, the invention provides a telecommunications environment configured to monitor information related to caller traffic responding to advertising campaigns. That information is passed to a network-accessible server and formatted for retrieval over the network. A subscriber to the reporting-service may connect, via the network, to the server and request a report, based on the caller traffic information, for a selected advertising campaign.
More specifically, the telecommunications environment includes a switch for connecting calls placed by a caller in response to an advertising campaign. The advertising campaign is identified by a particular directory number (the xe2x80x9ccampaign numberxe2x80x9d). The switch monitors calling information related to the call and forwards that calling information to a data recorder. The calling information includes the directory number of the party placing the call, the directory number called, whether the call was connected, the duration of the call, and other information. The data recorder passes the calling information for each advertising campaign to a web server where the calling information is accessible over the Internet. In this manner, the subscriber may connect to the web server over the Internet and request a report on the effectiveness of the advertising campaign.
In one aspect of the invention, the web server automates the task of identifying the calls made in response to an advertising campaign. The data collector is configured to identify calling information related to a directory number associated with an advertising campaign and forward that information to the web server. The web server includes software for tabulating and formatting that information into a report based on a subscriber""s request. The report is generated based on the current information available and in the format specified by the subscriber. The information may be presented based on many different criteria, such as, for example, a total number of calls per campaign, a percentage of calls per campaign, a number of attempted calls that received a busy signal, a number of attempted calls that were not answered, and the like.
In another aspect of the invention, the reports available to the subscriber reflect the latest information available. The calling information may be forwarded from the data collector to the web server in real-time, as the calling information becomes available from the switch. In that manner, a report generated by the web server provides the subscriber with real-time data regarding the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns.
In yet another aspect of the invention, the calling information associated with advertising campaigns may be combined with other information, stored in additional databases either resident on or accessible by the web server, to produce reports of demographic information about the respondents to the campaign.